On a farm I started.
Balanced on a gate at gardens end. Lost in some dancing vision. And as time passed, the dream became more real. Barbados dance theatre 1980, I started a life, in dance, from farm a love of nature’s gifts to stage. Laban, Martha Graham, Limon, Isadora Duncan, Ballet, Afro Caribbean artists, icons of materiality and music, shaping my world to inform, to create, for stage, film and to educate others.
Meanwhile two children, second husband dies, and then the final curtain call. Age 62, I bowed, and left the stage, began to search. I saw grief, and saw myself, the world through a new lens. So, it continues, the only boundaries now are the elasticity of time and my dreaming.
At 73, eleven years emerged from last stage door, I’m germinating expressions in prose, ceramic vessels, seeding works, raw, deeply personal, not monumental. I have a symbiotic relationship between dance and nature harvesting found objects for theatrical structured reflection and layering into sculptures assembled to convey a brilliance of purpose.
I also confess some darkness along the way. More grief and swing into pain, dance with the devil, a third husband. Three wedding dresses hang on wardrobes rail I close the door on marriage, mere fodder for the moths.
I used to dance, but now it’s done, still with me, although a wind behind shapes the passion. Passion for change, shape, as form informs the process. Thoughts though, not always pretty, while truths unravel, with clay, wax, wire, plaster, a true miscellany. Items from dusty cupboards gathered, echo feelings, memories of others in my mind’s eye, they are all whisperings. Materials embodied, sometimes translucent sometimes stitched and layered up on a life. My Intuition drives as once it did the dance and I know my worth and I defy unkindness.
Death and decay, skulls, dried vegetation, patterns in landscapes, all intrigue. And, though unfathomable it may seem, my thinning, falling, hair, incorporated as a talisman into my assemblage.
Surprise when I am glimpsed in eyes who wonder at my body of work, exhibitions flow and private collectors seize first editions.
The sound of love and laughter rings, an essence of change. Grandchildren rush in. A crisis, sudden loss of certainty, as my daughters life-threatening illness takes centre stage. Now my work is ever more urgent I am driven, it feels at a cellular level, a network of things begin to emerge, never imagined as wax drips and plaster forms bodies, I never knew, I am complicit, as I have deeply felt them.
But still, I balance on the farm gate, musing, with childish joy, you see dear reader the need to create burns ever, it’s light becomes ever brighter, and I ask you, how much time is left to love, before we are erased.
Carolyn Savidge 2026.